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SPEECH 



OF 



.tames Mcdowell of Virginia, 



WILMOT PROVISO. 



DELIVERED 



IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1850. 



WASHINGTON: 

PRINTED AT THE CONGRESSIONAL CLOBE OFFICE. 

1850. 



* 

* f\ rv 



TTTE WILMOT PROVISO. 



This hill, together with several proposed amendments 
thereto, including one for the imposition of^the " VVilmot 
proviso" upon the territorial Governments of Utah and New 
Mexico, being under consideration — 

Mr. McDOWELL saW, that at this late 
hour of legislative proceedings upon the mat- 
ters before the House, when the House and 
the country bothV were weary of any further 
discussion upon them, and were impatient for 
immediate decision, he felt that notwithstanding 
his own almost habitual forbearance of debate, 
he was now pushing his rights of speech to 
the very verge of offensiveness and intrusion. 
So strong, indeed, was this feeling, that much as 
he had intended and desired to discuss the Senate 
bills when they were first reported to the House, 
and have given to this and some others of them 
such support as he was able, he had relinquished 
his intention to do so, and but for the attempt to 
fasten the " Wilmot proviso" upon the territorial 
governments, he would not, at this moment, have 
risen to offer a thought to this House. But that 
proviso is in itself so hateful and hated — so revolt- 
ing to the sense of constitutional equality and 
right amongst his own constituents and those of 
every other southern Representative — so filled with 
capabilities and issues of national commotion, and 
it may even be of national conflict and ruin — that 
he considers it his duty, as long as it is here, and 
is deliberately pressed upon this body for adop- 
tion, to do all that he can to resist and to put 
it down. Hence he has risen now. But before 
he proceeds to the general remarks upon this and 
its associate subjects which he desires to submit, 
and in order to disembarrass them from any con- 
nection with a topic so unimportant to the House 
and to the public as himself individually, and to 
which he is somewhat constrained to refer, he 
considers it proper to say at the outset, that 
it was his fortune, eighteen or twenty years 
ago, when a member of the House of Dele- 
gates of Virginia, to make a speech in that body 
upon the institution of slavery, in which he in- 
quired into and exposed its nature, claims, and 
consequences, with the fearlessness and freedom 
which became him, as he believed, in his double 
capacity of citizen and delegate. Portions of his 
speech have, again and again, during the present 
and past sessions of Congress, been referred to by 
gentlemen in the other wing of the Capitol as well 



as in this, always, so far as he has noticed, with 
overwrought compliment, but almost always, too, 
with the apparent purpose of finding in them some- 
thing to justify their own opinions and course, and 
to control or tocondemn his. Whatever that speech 
is, Mr. Speaker, (said Mr. McD.) I mean to leave it 
to itself, unrevoked, unchanged, and undefended. 
Whether its sentiments be true or false, wise or 
foolish, it is at least, undeniable that they were 
spoken at the right place, to the right audience, 
and invoked action of the right parties. They 
were addressed to the people of Virginia, through 
their Legislature; to those who had established by 
their laws the institution spoken of, and who, and 
who only, within the limits of their State, had any 
rightful authority to modify, abolish, or maintain 
it. If the relation of Congress to this subject, in 
authority or in any other respect, were the same 
with that of the Legislature of Virginia, it would 
be obviously fair and just in that case, but in that 
only, that my opinions and course upon it in that 
body should be held up for acknowledgment or dis- 
avowal in this. 

Whatever the opinions I have expressed or en- 
tertain upon the institution of slavery in the ab- 
stract, I have never doubted for a moment, thataa 
the white and the black/aces now live together in 
the southern States, iu4 an indispensable institu- 
tion for them both. Physical amalgamation be- 
tween them is impossible, and would be ruinous if 
it were possible. Political and civil amalgama- 
tion, allowing an equality of power in the govern- 
ment, and of rights under it, is just as impossible; 
and though thought of and attempted in a few of 
the States, where the number of blacks, instead of 
being equal to or greater than the whites, as in some 
of the southern States, amounts to but a small per 
cent, of the whole, has even there been rejected 
as inadmissible and improper. Emancipation, with 

^rights of residence arid proptrty, but exclusion 
from social, civil, and political equality, would 
conduct, sooner or later, thtough the irrepressible 
heart-burnings and passions of human nature, to a 
war of colors, the bloodiest and cruelest of all wars, 
because founded upon an ineffaceable distinction, 
and therefore only capable of being stopped by 

•1 the extermination of one or other of its parties. 
Regarding this as the dreadful, but inevitsHe fa- 
tality of giving freedom to the southern slaves 
without removing them to some other land, I can- 



not and do not doubt but that their present condi- 
tion is the only happy and suitable one for them- 
selves or their masters, as long as they lire together in 
the same community; and thai melancholy, in some 
of its aspects, as it may be, theirs ia a case in which 
the restraint by the power of one man over the 
rights and liberty of another is a wise and benefi- 
cent one for the safety, the prosperity, and the life 
of both. 

The public policy in regard to this institution 
(said Mr. McD.) which is strikingly inculcated by 
its development and progress, is just that which 
every rational and temperate consideration of it 
will confirm, and that is, simply, to let it alone. 
Though it entered, in some sense, into our Confed- 
eration, and makes up some of the fundamental 
guarantees in our present Constitution, yet during 
the whole existence of our Government, for sixty- 
five or severity years, it has never been the occa- 
sion of any national disturbance, except when it 
has been made the subject of aggression for politi- 
cal ends. On the contrary, it has coexisted through- 
out the whole of that time with a growth in public 
•wealth, power, and greatness, and with an indi- 
vidual happiness, safety, and prosperity, neither 
of which, it may be confidently said, has any equal 
in any other country or age. Then let it alone; 
leave it with every responsibility it may impose, 
every remedy it may demand, every pressure of 
difficulty or danger it may reach, — leave it, with all 
of its consequences, to the wisdom, interest, and 
conscience of those upon whom the providence of 
God and the Constitution of the country have cast 
it-/ 

'Be assured that until it is competent for Con- 
gress to go with its power into the slaveholding 
States, and exert it there over master and slave, 
all its tamperings with slavery in the Territories, 
or in this District, in order to weaken, discourage, 
or break up the institution, will never be effectual 
for anything but mischief, wrong, and disaster. If 
it is an ordinance of Heaven, as some suppose it 
to be, it is, in that case, the wisest philosophy and 
religion to leave its development and solution to 
the power that ordained it/"*But if an ordinance 
of man only, then, too, it is wisest and best to 
leave it to those who are identified with its inter- 
ests and dangers, and not to others who are dis- 
connected from both. t 

Mr. McD. then said, that in addressing himself 
to the " proviso," as he would now do, he would 
discuss it in a few of its leading aspects only. And 
first, he objected to it that it was not only an un- 
constitutional, and, as to the free Slates, an un- 
necessary measure, (points that he had, in some 
degree, examined on a former occasion in this 
House,) but that it was a harsh, offensive, and 
dangerous violation of the equal rights of the States, 
and of th^cilizens of the .States. 

The/nrspgreat political effect of it is to establish 
a principle which will not only give to the free 
States all the territory that now belongs to" the 
Union, but all that may ever belong to it hereafter. 
Whatever territory, in the vicissitudes of our na- 
tional career, may be acquired by war, diplomacy, 
annexation, or other act of Government — all of it, 
under this principle, is to pass into the hands of 
thejBorthern or free States-, whilst the southern — 
nolhatttr what their contributions of means, tal- 
ents, exertions, or anything else, to secure it — no 
matter though they stood in the front rank of sac- 



rifice and of service in the day of acquisition — yet 
must they fall back into the rear-rank in the day 
of remembrance ami reward, and there, disowned, 
mortified, and thrust out from their associates, 
look for their share of the national wealth in 
the honor of their copartnership connection, and 
in the burdens, buffetings, hmises, and wound- 
ings of spirit which that copartnership may im- 
pose. Fasten your proviso upon the territorial 
bill before us, with fflf UVlXVat, upon your part, 
that it is the beginning of your system of " eternal 
non-extension" a gain st slaver y and sluveholdiiij; 
States, and what is it bur the Jirect division ot our 

™S~tuies into two great classes, one of which only is 
never to advance in numbers or extent, and both of 
which are to become more and more offensively dis- 
tinguished from one another every day by deepen- 
ing hostilitiesof sympathy and interest? Whatisit, 
in truth, but a clear, direct, deliberate disunion act, 
not conceived, as Mr. McD. believed, in a disunion 
spirit, nor looking to a disunion object, but capa- 
ble of working out no other result, and pressed 
upon us, too, at a moment when everything which 
wisdom can suggest or patience and patriotism 
can bear, will not be more than enough to keep 
the Union together? "If the position of North and 
South, in the matters now pending between them, 
had been reversed — if the South had stood in the 
place of the North, having twice its territory, twice 
its population, and all the majorities which our 
political system admits of, and thereby having the 
absolute control of the Government in its own 
hands, and entertaining withal the most unap- 
peasable hatred of its anti-slavery institutions of 
labor and society — if the South, being thus sit- 
uated, had not only proposed to bind the North 
hand and foot to the territorial limits which it now 
occupied, and to exert every power of the Gov- 
ernment to prevent, as much ns the breadth of its 
little finger, from being stretched beyond the walls 
of its territorial prison, but to exert the same power 

, to take to herself all the territory now held by the 
United States, and all it may ever hold, for the 
purpose of establishing an endless multiplication 
of slaveholding States upon it, — had the South 
made such a proposition for such a purpose, and 
followed it up by a relentless assault at this spot 
for months together upon the tastes, morals, 
habits, and institutions of the North, could you, 
who repiesent her, in candor say that your con- 
fidence in the equity and equitable intentions of 
the South wns not shaken ? Nay, would not your 
indignation and resentment have boiled over upon 
her? Would you not at once have told her that 
her proposition was not only inadmissible but in- 
sufferable — not only inequitable but insolent, and 
made in utter contempt of those covenant rela- 

■' tionships of which it was the utter destruction? 
And so thinking of it, would your people have had 
no tongue to speak out the thought? Would they 
have laid silently and passively by, and permitted 
a great anticipated wrong to be pushed on to its 
worst before they would have risen up to remon- 
strate and resist? Would Faneuil Hull have been 
voiceless and dumb, whilst measures were going 
forwurd in this body directly calculated, if not de- 
signed, to impair the rights, interests, and power 

| of Massachusetts? No, Mr. Speaker; if the South 
had but made this proposition, (which is just that 
of the North to her,) and pressed it with every 

11 influence and power she could have commanded, 



there is not a spot of New England that would not 
have glowed like a living coal. Nor is there a 
single spot in the far and the free West where the 
people would not have risen up instantly and indig- 
nantly to resist and resent as coming from the South, 
but affecting them, the very measures which they 
have for years past been striving so strenuously 
and anxiously to fixand fasten upon her. 

You cannot wonder, then, that she, who has a 
"pulse to riot and a blood to glow" as well as 
yourselves, should have had her feelings moved to 
their innermost depths at the dishonoring and de- 
spoiling schemes which have been maturing against 
her, or that, being so moved, she should here and 
there have poured out those feelings in terms of 
exasperation, bitterness, and defiance. But pass- 
ing from this aspect of the subject before us, 
(which, in truth, said Mr. McD., is rather too ex- 
citing for the perfect calmness that it was his wish 
and purpose to maintain,) he would say of the 
proviso, in the next place, that it puts the South 
in a situation which makes it certain, that do as 
she will in regard to it, she is sure to be a sufferer. 
If her citizens, in order to get their share of a com - 
rTJon estate, go into the Territaries^heymus^TunTle Y 
ftllg proviso, leave tn eir slaves behind them, an d 
tr Ki'iby incrCase TIW actual or tending over-propor - 
ti on ot blacks to wintes, in the slaveholding States, 
which is an increasing evil in the system of slavery 
that has always been felt and known as the most 
threatening and irrepressible of any other. But 
as this evil, in the natural progress of population, 
is of gradual and slow development, it carries 
along with it its own means of mitigation and re- 
lief. The operation o f that prnirior^ however, 
going to the removal of the master and the reten- 
tion of the slave in his place, takes away all such 
means of mitigation and relief, and brings on this 
evil of an over numbe r of blacks instantly and ir- 
reparably.* And this" it does, not simply by chan- 
ging the relative number of the two races and thus 
the basis of increase, but by enabling the black 
race, as the result of this increased disproportion, 
to absorb into itself all the common and all the 
_^ handi craft labors both of the field and tjhejiliop, 
anH thereby compel whole nTasses of laboring 
white people to seek for employment and subsist- 
ence in other States. Every emigration, therefore, 
which can take place from the South, under the 
proviso, can have no other effect upon it than that 
tfffrippling and exhausting it in its highest capaci- 
ties of well being, by stripping it of its best popu- 
lation, and leaving its worst behind. Thus opera- 
ting, the alternative which is held out to the South 
by the proviso is just this: either that her citizens 
shall notgo under it to the Territories at all, and so 
the South have no_ more direct pa^hcipation in 
them than if they had never been acquire!, or that 
if they do go, it shall be upon terms onerous, per- 
haps, to themselves, and certainly disastrous to 
their States. 

Look at the consequences of this proviso meas- 
ure as they affect the property and security, and 
go to unsettle, in vital respects, the whole social 
structure of the slaveholding States: and does it 
riot occur to gentlemen here, that its enactment 
would be virtually the exercise, by the General 
Government, of high powers of legislation within 
the borders and upon the affairs exclusively be- 
longing to State jurisdiction? But if this is denied, 
carf it be said of this Government, when it exer- 



cises its power over a public property in such way 
as to render its use easy and advantageous to a 
portion of the States, but inconvenient and even 
disastrous to another portion, that it is honestly 
and equitably fulfilling it3 high trust of applying 
its powers for the common honor and interests of 
a common country ? 

There is yet another objection, Mr. Speaker, to 
this "proviso," which Mr. McD. said was so 
especiaTTyoffensive to the judgment and feelings 
of southern people, that though often commented 
on, he could not pass over without a remark or 
two; and that is, that it destr oys all individual 
equality between the citizens 3f the slaveholding 
and the citizens of the free_£!tates, in the use and 
enjoyment of a common, property. Is that so? 
But first, Mr. Speaker, the South is told, that 
whatever the effect of this proviso or restriction 
upon slavery, she has on two solemn occasions 
agreed to it heretofore — once in the ordinance 
of 1787, and then in the Missouri compromise of 
1819 — and is thus estopped by her own acts from 
making any objections to it now. It is true that 
on the occasions mentioned, which were those of 
great national exigency and trial, the South, acting, 
as it is believed, upon the principle that the public 
safety is the supreme law, did agree to this restric- 
tion. And this agreement is an estoppel to objec- 
tions! Take this idea in the abstract, and will 
any one say that it is sound and satisfactory logic 
to infer, that because one of two great parties 
agreed, in a case of extreme international difficulty, 
and as a special provision to meet and relieve it, 
to take less than its full rights would entitle it to, 
that therefore these rights are extinct and can 
never be set up or maintained by that party again? 
Take this idea as a practical one, and who is there 
that will not say that this double relinquishment 
of a part of its rights by one great geographical 
party of the United" States for the benefit of the 
whole, is not. merely enough to discharge it from 
all further demands of a like kind , but enough also 
to lay all other geographical parties under the 
clearest obligations of reciprocity and of honor to 
perform kindred services for the country, when- 
ever kindred occasions should exist to require 
them ? If such acts of national generosity nobly 
rendered, to protect and to save a people at their 
hour of utmost need, are to be followed up by ex- 
j actions and outlawry upon the rights and feelings 
of those who perform them, then will the strong 
spirit of a nation's ultimate reliance be stricken 
down and broken. 

As to the ordinance of '87, a word or two may 
be offered. / 

Before the*North western Territory was ceded by 
Virginia to the United States, and whilst it re- 
mained as a component part of her domain, it will 
not be denied that it was competent to that Slate, 
as sovereign proprietor, to establish or to refuse the 
establishment of slavery upon it. Nor will it be 
! denied that it was just as competent to her to 
i do the very same thing by conditions of cession, 
j when ceding away her proprietorship to another. 
These are equivalent acts of the same authority. 
The only question of power in the case is, not 
I whether Virginia had the power of creating or pro- 
I hibiting the institution of slavery over the North- 
western Territory, (for of that there is no ques- 
tion,) but whether Congress, controlled by the 
I terms of the Federal Constitution and acting under 



*hp*Ud&. 



f> 



them, had the power of binding itself to take und 
hold the territory under any conditions whatsoever 
upon the subject of that institution ? There is no 
express grant of such authority , unless it is to be 
found in the first clause of the sixth article of the 
Constitution, in which it is declared that " all debts 
contracted and engagements entered into, before 
the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid 
against the United Sintes under this Constitution 
as under the Confederation;" and here, accord- 
ingly, the direct authority is commonly believed to 
be found. The deed of cession for this territory 
having been made under the Confederation, is pre- 
cisely one of those "engagements" which, it is 
thought, this article of the Constitution was in- 
tended to recognize and provide for. Suppose it 
to be so, what then? To be valid under the new 
Constitution, it must first have been so under the 
Confederation. This is ihe precedent condition in 
the case — " as valid against the United Stales uuder 
this Constitution as under the Confederation" are 
the terms. What was not valid, then, as an " en- 
gagement" under the Confederation, was never 
made so by those terms. 

Now, it is well known to the members of this 
House, that Mr. Madison, in one of the numbers 
of the Federalist, (33:h,) expressly affirms of this 
cession of the Northwestern Territory, that it 
rested upon the necessity of the case alone, and 
was entered into by the Congress of the Confeder- 
ation " without the shadow of constitutional sanc- 
tion." Mr. Madison does not give the reasons for 
this opinion, as he need not have done, for no one 
can read the Articles of Confederation without see- 
ing them. 

The compact for the cession of the North west- 
ern Territory, providing 'or the perpetual exclusion 
of slavery from its limits, having been made by 
Congress, in the opinion of this statesman, without 
even the "shadow of constitutional sanction," 
and, therefore, incapable of becoming one of the 
valid " engagements" recognized by the present 
Constitution of 'til), it follows, that that territory 
was made free by the act of Virginia alone, and that 
whatever the blessings are which have resulted to 
it and its citizens on that account, and which have 
so often and so ardently been discoursed upon here, 
are to be referred back to her as the legitimate and 
parent source of them all. 

But quitting this digression, Mr. Sneaker, and 
going back to the objection stated to the " pro- 
viso," that it destroys all equality between the 
citizens of the slaveholding ami of the free States 
in the use and enjoyment of a common property. 
la this objection a true oner . 

Appreciating the per ft <t familiarity of the 
II iuse with this point, Mr. l\dcD would make 
out the case it presents as briefly as he could. 

Let us suppose, then, that a citizen of Massa- 
chusetts desires to emigrate to, and settle noon, 
some part of our Mexic in territory. He accord" 
ingly goes there, buys a piece of land where ii is 
most agreeable to him, andimmi diately fixes him- 
self upon U with all the pi iperty which he pos- 
or which he beliei best for t he im- 

provement and comfi rl A 

citizen of Virginia i to emigrate to, 

this ame I 1 1 itory 
II , too, goes there, buys land and prepan to" 
:•■, and improve it with s I the property, i n 
eluding slaves, which he can command; but when 



in the very act, as you may suppose, of seating 
himself in, and enjoying his new home, he is, for the 
first time, told by his Massachusetts neighboi that 
he cannot do so until he shall dispose of his 
slaves. " What !" is the natural exclamation, " is 
not this the land of the United States?" " Cer- 
tainly." " And are we not equally the citizens of 
the United States and equally entitled, as such, to 
own it and reside upon it with every lawful property 
that belongs to us and that we want to employ P 
" Certainly — every properly Out slaves; they only 
are prohibited. And in this prohibition no differ- 
ence is made between us; for it is no more allow- 
able for a Massachusetts man than it is for a Vir- 
ginian to bring a slave into this territory with him. 

i Therefore, we are equals under this prohibitory 
law, though at first sight it may seem otherwise 
to you." Is not this statement a sophism ? Both 
of these emigrants are citizens of the same coun- 
try; both seek a home upon the common property 
Of that country; one of them with, the other 

;i without slaves. 

The emigrant who has no slaves, who never 
had any, who never, perhaps, desired to bane, 
arry, and who never had the right to have any. 

1 under the constitution and laws of the. State fiom 
w-b+ch he came, goes into the territory, buy-e, 

I builds, and settles where.-he pleases, without a 
word or question or a moment of delay. But the 
other emigrant who has slaves — who has always 

i had them, and who has always had the right to 

; have them under the constitution and laws of his 
Slate — is not permitted to settle in the same way, 
but is first required to give up his slaves, no mat- 

! ter what thfi~inconvenience, or wha-t the sacrifice 
! of interest or of feeling, even to the slaves them- 
selves, which it may produce. Can you say that 

j these two citizens stand, in all that is essential to 

! the use and enjoyment of a caiwmoa right, upon a 

! footing of perfect equality with one another? Can 

you say that they have the same facilities and en- 

;l couragements to seek for and possess themselves 

, of a common property ? Is not one of them dis- 
couraged, incommoded, and hindered in this ob- 
ject? And is not every hindrance to its whole 

; extent, be it little or much, jus! so far an abridge- 
ment of right ? Why, the whole legal idea of a 
right is, that it is one which can be enjoyed un- 
molested, undiminished, and freely. An obstruc- 

; tion thrown "in the way of such enjoyment, if 
done by an individual, is ah offence for which he 

) is liable to action of law and payment of damages. 
If done by a government, it is in the very nature 
of confiscation, and is just as allowable in prin- 
ciple, though it is less lawless in degree! when for- 
bidding the removal of a slave into a Territory, 
than the removal of his master. 

In the ease nut of the emigrants from Massa- 
chusetts and Virginia, is not one of those hindered 
and embarrassed by conditions of settlement which 
are very oni rous to bun, but not in the least so to 
the other? Is not that one required, before he is 
allowed to settle upon one single acre of the land 
which belongs, individually, as much to him as to 
anyb »dy else, that he shall first give up another 
rigln of his own which he holds under the consti- 
ite, and under the guarantees of 
thai which we profess to administer here? Is he 
not required n> abandon one. right as the condition 
of using another, whilst no kindred condition, nor 
one of any kind at all, is required of the other 



. «\j.-.tv 



How, then, can you say that these emigrants are 
ecjUal — that no difference is made between them jj 
in the use of a property which they hold alike, 
and by the act of a Government which is bound to 
treat them alike? How can you say this, and ! 
think this, when the contrary is so obviously the 
case ? 

No doubt many are misled upon this point by 
the idea, that because all persons, after going into i 
the Territory, are under the operation of the same 
anti-slavery law, therefore, there is no inequality 
amongst them. This is true after they become 
citizens of the Territory. But the inequality whic h ! 
this " provi so" produces ts established against th£ 
Blav^ho'ldlhg citizen before he goes in it. It is put j 
upon him as the precedent condition of his going 
there at all. It is in our original position of citi- ji 
zens — citizens of the respective States, and before 
our entrance into the Territories is attained, that 
this anti-slavery scheme makes the distinction of ' 
rights which we complain of. It is here in this 
position chat this scheme assails us — assails us by 
proposing to you, who hold the Territories only 
as a trustee for the benefit of all the States, the 
passing of a law which shall deprive every slave- 
holder in America of any personal participation in 
them, except upon the surrender of rights which 
he holds under the recognition of both the Federal 
and State Constitutions, but which law, at the 
same time, shall throw them wide open to all the 
rest of mankind, without question, condition, or 
restraint. If this would not be inequality amongst 
equals in the administration of an equal right, it is 
impossible for the human understanding to con- 
ceive, or for human government to enact what 
would be. 

Still, there are those amongst us who consider 
the passing of such a law right and proper. But if 
it is right and proper — if it is constitutional and 
just to regulate the rights of settlement in the Ter- 
ritories on the slaveholding principle, is it not 
equally so to regulate the appropriation of the 
moneys which arise from the sale of these territo- 
ries upon the same principle? What is the differ- 
ence between refusing to a citizen of Florida the 
right of settling upon your territory of New Mex- 
ico, except upon the surrender of his slaves, and 
refusing to appropriate a single dollar for which 
that territory may be sold for the uses of Florida, 
except upon thesurrender by her of hgr slavehold- 
ing system ? T nere seems to be no good* reason 
why you may not just as well demand of a south- 
ern State that she shall give up her slavehoTding 
rights s as the condition of appropriating any part 
of the land proceeds to her benefit, as demand of a 
southern citizen that he shall give up his share of 
these rights as the condition of allowing to him an 
acre of the land itself. 

In fact, this whole plan of restriction upon a , 
particular property is a plan of inequality amongst 
emigrants; and nothing else can be made of it, as 
long as it is agreed that the territories are the com- ' 
mon property of the United States, and Congress 
the common Government of the States and the 
people to administer it. If the territories are, in- 
deed, common property, then the exclusion from 
their use of any part of the people by conditions 
not affecting all of them alike, is clearly and offen- 
sively unequal. And are they not common prop- 
erty ? Many of them are made so by actual stipu- 
lation to that effect, and the rest of them are no .! 



less so by necessary operation of the constitutional 
provisions under which they have been acquired, 
and can only be held. Those that were relin- 
quished by the several States that claimed them, 
were so relinquished by deeds of cession which set 
forth, with scarcely any variation of language, that 
they were to be held for " the common use and ben- 
efit" of the United States, the ceding State in- 
cluded. The tenure of those is thus fixed by com- 
pact. And without resorting to any analysis of 
the Constitution to show that the tenure of all the 
territories is obliged to be the same with those — for 
the common use and benefit — it would be more 
conclusive, perhaps, to prove,«from the records of 
the Government, that such has been the judgment 
and action of our ancestors concerning them. 

When Virginia, responding to certain overtures 
from Congress upon the subject of her western 
territories, proposed, in 1781, to make a cession of 
the northwestern portion of them upon the several 
conditions which Congress had suggested, but 
with a superadded one of her own, her proposition 
was so hateful to several of her sister States that 
they frequently and indignantly remonstrated 
against it;, and not only that, but refused, on ac- 
count of it, to sign the Articles of Confederation; 
and so continued to refuse until the Confederation 
itself was in danger of falling to pieces. They 
boldly declared the territories to be the common 
property of all the States; and as such, belonging 
to them, not qualifiedly and conditionally, but ab- 
solutely and of right; not for the aggrandizement 
of any one or a few, but for the common use and 
benefit of them all. Though lying within the 
chartered limits of Virginia, they nevertheless re- 
garded these territories as being, in fact, the Crown 
lands of the King of England, as thereby put into 
issue by the war of independence, and thus falling 
to the confederated parties generally, as the spoil 
of successful revolution. 

" We cannot be silent, (says New Jersey, in her 
•legislative remonstrance upon this subject, of 
' June, 1783,) when viewing one State aggrandizing 
' hefcelf by the unjust detention of that property 
' which has been procured by the common blood 
' and treasure of the whole; and which, on every 
' principle of reason and justice, is vested in Con- 
' gress for the use and general benefit of the Union 
' they represent." 

If these clear and strong terms by which New" — 
Jersey describes the territorial acquisitions of the 
Revolution (supposing the territories to be really 
Crown lands) are the right ones, and if her deduc- 
tion is also right, that as these acquisitions were 
made by the common blood and treasure of the 
whole, that, therefore, they vested, in every prin- 
ciple of reason and justice, in Congress for the gen- 
eral benefit of the Union it represented: are they 
not just as truly the terms, and the only terms by 
which the war acquisitions of this day can be de- 
scribed ? And do these acquisitions not belong just 
as certainly, on the same principles of reason and 
justice, to Congress, as the common and representa- 
tive government of the States and the people, and 
so belong to it for their general benefit? How 
else can our war acquisitions, and the rights which 
proceed from them, be more accurately described 
and defined? Are they not made now, as then, 
by the common blood and treasure of all? and 
what are they, therefore, but the common property 
of all ? and how can they vest but in the common 






government of all, by virtue of whose authority 
they were made ? and to what end can they be ap- 
plied, but to the common use and benefit of all? 
Upon this sound view of (he revolutionary case, 
New Jersey, and her associates, demanded that 
there should be no withholding by one of the 
States, nor, consequently, by any fractional num- 
ber of them, of the acquired territory; but a full 
and unconditional surrender of every part of it to 
the whole of the States, that the whole of them 
might share in its uses and advantages ulike. And 
this, because of its indisputable justice and expe- 
diency both, there is much reason to believe, was 
the very ground on which Virginia, impelled, also, 
by her habitual generosity, ultimately abandoned 
the condition complained of, and gave up her terri- 
torial domain precisely in the way that Coneress 



8 ___ 

they may choose, excepting only the slave prop- 
erty of the South, carry along with it no prejudice 
to the claims of the South .'—claims to have her 
property rights, and the property rights of her cit- 
izens, protected and respected ? — claims which are 
fundamental to every well-governed State? Does 
such repudiation of the property of a State, affect- 
ing its uses and its value, create no prejudice against 
the claims of that Slate? If it does do so, as it 
obviously does, then is it interdicted by this pro- 
hibitory clause of the Constitution, and ought to 
be abandoned. 

Besides, is it forgotten that whenever, under one 
system of double constitutions, one for federal 
and one for local purposes, a citizen has any inter* 
est lying without the cognizance or jurisdictional " 
'imits of his State, but within those of the Federal 



had desired. Her claim to the territory as a strictly ' Government, he has the very same ri"ht to call 
legal one, was believed, by those who directed her 
councils and were entitled to her confidence, to be 
perfectly valid. Mr. Jefferson 3aid it was. Mr. 
Madison said it was, and called the opposition 
which was made to it in Congress, (as will be seen 
in his published letters,) "a factious and unprinci- 
pled opposition" — words of unparallele/f harsh- 
ness for him. And since their day, the Supreme 
Court of the United States has sanctioned their 
opinion, in a case in which the chartered limits, or 
territorial rights of Virginia were put in contest. 

The prominent position of New Jersey in this 
matter of the territory is referred to, not only be- 
cause it is exactly in point, but because it is hoped 



upon that Government to protect it that he would 
have to call upon the State to do so, if it were em- 
braced by its authority? Of this nature is the 
interest which every citizen of Virginia has in the 
Territories, and his right to go to them and live in 
them as he chooses; and this interest and right of 
his, it is as much the duty and business of the 
Federal Government lo muke good to him, and 
that without hindrance or disadvantage of any 
kind, as it would be that of Virginia if the Terri- 
tories were hers. 1 

Relying upon these and other grounds, which 
he had no time at present to submit, Mr. McD. 
appealed with earnestness and with confidence- 



that her present representatives will not repudiate to Congress to maintain all the immunities of the 



and disown its wisdom, but will cheerfully give 
their voice to reavow and confirm it. 

We of the South, with even clearer justice, stand 
this day upon the former ground of New Jersey, 
and demand, as she did, that there shall be no 
holding back of anything that is due; no distinc- 
tion of rights amongst parties that are equal; no 
endowments of some and disfranchisements of 
others; but full protection and perfect equity to all 
in their use, enjoyment, and appropriation of a 
common estate. Can you give her less than ahis, 



Constitution, and so relieve the South from the 
flagitious wrong which the " proviso'' threatens 
against her. We of the South have bated nothing, 
but borne to the uttermost with others every sacri- 
fice and burden which our territorial acquisitions 
occasioned. We demand, therefore, to have meas- 
ure for measure — to share to the uttermost with 
others also in the benefits which these acquisitions 
have brought. Above all things do we hope to 
be spared the indignity of being asked to submit 
to conditions in their use, which neither our rights 



and yet fulfill the Constitution, and do the justice ,' nor our feelings can warrant— conditions, too, 



it intends ? 

None knew better than the framers of that in- 
strument, many of whom were lawyers of the 
highest national eminence, how possible it was for 
it* general objects to be sacrificed by plausible but 
perverted views of particular parts. In order, 
therefore, to prevent this, and to make the Gov- 
ernment correspond in its action with what it was 



which we are almost the only people in the world to 
be insulted by, and yet the only one who areas fully 
entitled as you who threaten us, to be shielded 
and exonerated from. 

The felons who are annually disgorged upon 
our shfTres from Europea n dungeons; the foulest 
and most unwashed oi that vTlst tiiuliitude which 

(ToT 



comes upon us, Throng after throng, I mm the 
intended to be, they declared, in the most emphatic ' whole earth — " Parthians, Medes and Elamites, 



and auihoritative manner, that " nothing contained 

• in the Constitution should be so construed as to 

* prejudice any of the claim* of the United States, 
•or of any particular Stale." In this they provi- 
ded a practical, simple, and comprehensive test by 
which to judge of and to restrain the evils of con- 
struction, and to secure the Constitution in the 
fulfillment of its object*. No matter how clearly 
at first view any proposed msseure might seem to 
lie within the range of constitutional sunt tion, yet, 
if at IbhI it was leer) to involve in any of its bear- 
ing! even the smallest prejudice lo the United 
Stolen, or tO any particular State, it Itood, ipwfacto, 
inadmissible anil forbidden. Howie il with the 

," when tried by this lesi < Does not the 
permission which it gives to emigrant* to introduce 
into the Territories every kind of property which 



Jews, proselytes, Cretes, and Arabians,'' no mat- 
ter who or what they are, — all — all are invited to 
go in upon this property, pick, choose, and live 
upon it where they please, excepting only the 
southern citizens who have given of their money, 
labor, and life to attain il! They only are to have 
the door slammed in their faces, and to be required 
to stand back until they produce their ticket of 
admission. 

AVhi n our right to the restoration of our fugitive 
slaves ie'practioally denied us; when our unfortu- 
nate citizen* who go into your States to prosecute 
it, relying in good faith upon (he Constitution and 
laws of the Republic upon that subject to aid them, 
and are there received as outlaws themselves, har- 
assed by your officer* of justice and pursued and 
ovcrwhtlmcd by mobs of your people with re- 



9 



proach, insult, violence, and sometimes even with 
death — when this takes place, we feel ourselves 
wronged, aggrieved and outraged — literally and 
abusively stripped of a right which you who 
offend and we who suffer both know to have been 
so fundamental to the Union that it never could 
have b^en formed without a guarantee to maintain 
it. "We remonstrate against this conduct — we do 
it angrily and indignantly; we consider it a willful 
abandonment of yourconstitutional obligations and 
a grievous injury to our public as well as private 
interests. But we do not feel that it dishonors us. 
Aggrieved by it we are, but it does not wound us 
in that keenest, quickest and most delicate sense so 
characteristic of us as individuals and as a people, 
the proud, unconquerable, exultant sense of every 
American heart — that of absolute and inviolable 
personal equality. This you cannot assail with- 
out producing a pang. And yet this is the very 
sense which the "proviso" does assail — which it 
wounds causelessly and deeply, and hence, for the 
most part, the convulsions which you see. We 
could not claim to be Americans, and we would 
not be Americans, if we did not resist, as alike in- 
suiting and injurious, any exercise, especially any 
deliberate and systematic exercise of the powers i 
of this Government by which the rights of i 
it, in any matter whatever, were to be dispensed to 
the South upon terms of inferiority to others. 
Such distinctions cannot be endured. Yet such is ! 
that which your proviso involves — a distinction ; 
utterly alien to the relationships and the interests \ 
of the parties, and portending, if imposed, a hateful 
future of strife, hostility, and rupture between 
them. 

Asa Representative from Virginia, then, he (Mr. 
McD.) invoked the House to threaten that State 
with t his measure no longer, but to abandon j t 
nftw ana rorever . Irlaving mentioned trie State of 
Virginia, Mr. "McD. was thereby reminded of the 
frequency with which it had been the pleasure of 
gentlemen here to taunt that State with the decay 
of her political fortunes, reproaching her with the 
difference between what she is and what she was, 
and with the difference also, in material wealth, 
between her and some of the younger and thriftier 
States that have sprung up around her. In all 
this he did not think that that Commonwealth had 
suffered in any way or to any extent whatsoever 
that called, under existing circumstances, for retal- 
iation or defence at the hands of herRepresentatives. 
Indeed, it would bea very false estimate of the value 
of these reproaches, to deny them the generous im- 
punity of the legal maxim, " de minimis non curat 
itar." They have done no harm and left no sting; 
and, though they glared for a moment with signs of 
disaster to the "Old Dominion," yet they have 
fallen upon -her as the meteoric lights which, 
rising up from regions of swamp and disease, float 
and gleam for a while, and then explode upon the 
earth without jarring, jostling, or disturbing 
for an instant its onward and its massive move- 
ment. Whenever the blow is struck that is hard 
enough to hurt, it will be time enough then to 
defend. 

Meanwhile, I commend to the Representatives 
of Virginia, that they lay their heads calmly 
down upon the pillow of her renown, and enjoy in 
quiet their fortunate birthright in a Common wealth 
whose long annals exhibit her in many a patriotic 
and proud association with duty and achieve- 



ment, but in no solitary one of improbity or dis- 
honor. 1 commend also to ourassuilants the culture 
of a kindlier temper, and the selection* of a more 
manageable subject. And may I be pardoned for 
adding that the kindliest spirit is the only suitable 
and wise one for us all. No other one at such an 
hour of difficulty as the present can go so far, or 
do so much to settle it aright. The more perfect 
our personal intercourse and union with one an- 
other, the more hearty and triumphant will be our 
labors for that national one which is in danger. 
And till that preservation is complete, and that uan- 
gergone — till we shall stand on theothershoreofthe 
Red sea, safely delivered from all the perils of its 
passage, with our precious burden uninjured in our 
arms — till that is accomplished wc should belong, 
soul, spirit, and body, to it, without division and 
without distraction win anything else. It is an ob- 
ject large and grand, and dear enough to absorb 
every faculty that we have, in itself — to shut out 
every alienating and prejudiced passion from the 
heart, and bind us up in a sense of brotherhood so 
real and so consecrating as to make each of us feel 
that he whodoeth the best for the greatest interest of 
that brotherhood — he who doeth, at this hour, the 
work of the Union in righteousness and in justice — 
he it is who embodies the most precious of all re- 
lations into one, and is our " mother, and brother, 
and sister." 

In the early and magnificent day of the fortunes 
of Virginia, when her will was almost the law of 
the country, and her arm almost its defence, no 
emergency ever arose in its affairs in which she was 
not ready and willing to do or to suffer, to serve or 
to sacrifice, in any way which that emergency de- 
manded, or which the loftiest standard, not of na- 
tional duty merely, but of national magnanimity, 
could call for. If asked for contributions to the 
general good, she gave them in no faltering, hesi- 
tating, truckling spirit— trimming, clipping, and 
paring them down to the meaerest and most mi- 
serly minimum that might suffice — but laying a 
bold and a free hand upon the best of her means, 
she would draw them forth without stint, and, put- 
ting them in the hands of the nation, with a bless- 
ing upon them, would say, as she did so, " There, 
take that; and if more is necessary, you shall have 
it." When the country was convulsed with dis- 
sensions upon the subject of the Northwestern 
Territory, (the first of our great territorial con- 
tests,) and the Confederacy was tottering to disso- 
lution on account of it, she gave the whole of 
that territory up, without the reservation of a sin- 
gle acre, except for the satisfaction of the revolu- 
tionary officers and soldiers whom she had gener- 
ously employed in the common cause, upon pledges 
of bounties, pensions, and wages, to be paid by 
herself. Nay, more than this: she not only gave 
up her property in the soil, but she gave up, in a 
great degree, also her share in its common use, by 
stamping it forever with a domestic policy which 
was not her own. Thus she made it the inex- 
haustible dowry of" free labor and free soil;" and 
thus she rocked the cradle, and sheltered the head, 
and nourished the manhood, of many a one who 
has risen up even in this Hall, not to recall the 
beneficence which had blessed him, but to mock at 
the wasted condition which that very beneficence 
had helped to produce. Unlike the Roman 
daughter who gave her own virgin bosom to sus- 
tain°the life of her sinking and famishing parent, 



10 



some of our daughter Commonwealths of America 
decry and deride their parent Commonwealth, for 
the weakened condition which her gifts of life, 
and strength, and power to them have occasioned. 

Again, too, when our Federal Constitution had 
been wrought out to itspresent form in all material 
points, except in the representativesiructureof the 
Senate, and whin the contests upon that — whether 
it should rest upon numbers or upon States — were 
pressed to an extremity that threatened the instant 
and inevitable defeat of the whole scheme of the 
Constitution, and the probable dissolution of the 
Confederacy itself — when this came to be the case, 
and there was v.o remedy for it but in the conces- 
sion, by the larger or the smaller States, of the 
ground of Straggle between them, then it was that 
Virginia, though the first in political importance — 
the rir$t in the number and the renown of her pub- 
lic men — the first in territory and in population, 
and in all the capabilities and calculations of a 
progressive and powerful future — yet renounced 
them all for the common good, and generously 
making the concession which the case required, 
abandoned the principle of numbers for that of 
equality in the Senate, and determined, thereafter, 
to rely upon her equals there for that justice to her 
rights which her own power, upon the principle 
abandoned, would have been so perfectly sufficient 
to ha\e enforced for herself. 

For all this she neither expects nor desires any 
special requital; she is no beggar for the gratitude 
or the compassion or the help of communities who 
have grown rich and great upon her spirit and her 
acts; she makes no suppliant appeal to them nor 
to any other portion of this earth for "a penny to 
blind Beliearius." She asks for nothing and wants 
nothing from her associates but that simplest and 
slightest justice which Governments, or which in- 
dividuals can show to one another — that of immu- 
nity from wrong. This she is entitled to demand, 
and docs demand. Is it too much? Is a demand 
so small, yet so righteous and so needful to the 
restored peace 'if an agitated and contending coun- 
try, too much for the North cheerfully and freely 
to grant to her early friend and ally of the South ? 

This South has been the intimate political part- 
ner of you of the North for more than seventy 
riali; you have grown up from feebleness to 
maturity together, aiding, comforting, sustaining 
one another at every turn in the career of national 
life, with every resource of means, counsel, and 
arms which either had to give. You of the North 
have found her true and steadfast in every scene 
and every hour that could try her; making your 
friends her friends, your enemies her enemies, 
maintaining your honor as her own, and ever 
ready to bat k you with her life in every conflict 
of power to whii h jroo have been called by the 

ftawiotti and the acts of others. Togethei you 
aid the i'. undalion of your political Union; together 
you worked upon, watched over, and advanced it; 
snap' , interlocked, and clamped all of 

its par:* in) I IT) iv« '.'.hole by mu- 

tual counsels for mutual ends: together you bore 
it onward day by day, and M il grew under your 

form ar d reatei tnd 

onto i pace, and towered up by little 

Olid little into Still loftier height and larger dimen- 
sions, until at Is li hi ad gleamed in the 
sun, and it Htood forth upon these ends of eiva- 
tion, the praise und the glory of the whole earth; 



you still labored upon it, through all this, as at 
first, with one object, one heart, one common and 
fervent invocation to the Father of all, that he 
would prosper, preserve, and perpetuate it forever. 
Whatever that Union or country is; whatever 
the peace it has bestowed; whatever the develop- 
ments of energy and happiness it has encouraged; 
whutever the radiance it has shed upon the princi- 
ples of human government; whatever the power 
of organization and defence it has given to the 
spirit and the hope of freedom amongst the masses 
of mankind ; whatever the throbbing love of liber- 
ty which it has lit up in the heart of the world; 
whatever in these and all things else that country 
is, it is the common offspring of the cares, contri- 
butions, counsels, and labors of you both. 

That true and faithful partner — your co-laborer 
and co-equal, unaltered in her domestic condition 
from what she waa when you first knew and cov- 
enanted with each other — that partner, the South, 
stands here to-day, in the persons of her sons, and 
asks through them, with the profoundest con- 
sciousness of its necessity and justice to you both, 
that no cause of disaffection and of quarrel be al- 
lowed to grow up and mature between you; that 
in adjusting your mutual interests, no wrong be 
meditated or inflicted upon such as are peculiar to 
herself; that no cup of bitterness be pressed to her 
lips, no immedicable wound be given to her affec- 
tions. Nay, she stops not here, but goes still fur- 
ther, and adjures you by the memories of the past, 
by t*e sympathies of your long and happy con- 
nection with each other; by all that you have or 
that you hope for, in the glories of your land; by 
your own, and by your children's good, that you 
strive with her to' extinguish at once, and forever, 
every ungenerous, and every separating purpose or » 
passion between you, and go on peacefully and hag- • 
pily to the complete fulfillment of t|je destiny you. 
have begun ; turning the labors and wisdom of your 
oast into a still wiser and grander future, and bear- 
ing forward to its utmost perfection a Government 
which has no equal upon earth, by a fidelity to 
one another, which nothing upon earth can weaken 
or destroy. Do this, and when centuries shall 
have come and gone, the fire upon your altar, the 
light of your example will shine forth as radiantly 
and cheerily as now, and your spirit — that of your 
Union and Constitution and laws, be made the 
guiding and renovating spirit of every age and of 
every clime, so that when that mysterious and 
dread succession which limits all human things, 
and crowds nations as well as individuals into the 
tomb, shall sweep us off, our principles and our 
blessings i-hall survive, and though,this loved tem- 
ple of ours be cast to the ground, and all its pil- 
lars lie broken and buried in the dust, yet like the 
bones of the buried prophet, the nation that touches 
them, though it were dead, yet will it quicken into 
life. 

It is (said Mr. McD.) with something of revul- 
sion that I turn from this idea of a prospered 
and perpetu ited people, to that ill-omened and ob- 
noxious measure for the Territories which I have 
been examining, and winch has hung with its 
"Shadows, clouds, and darkness," so long over 
the fortunes of the country. What, I ask, is 
ths necessity whieh calls lor its adoption? Is 
there any necessity ; — any so supreme in its con- 
nection with the public security or public peace, 
a8 to override and frown down all probable and 



11 



contingent consequences, and make it a matter of jj 
absolute and imperative duty to adopt it? No, I 
sir; there is no such necessity nor anything akin 
to it, either existing or expected. Apart from the 
strong but false ground of sectional advantage upon 
which it rests, tlie other considerations upon which 
it is supported are the abstract ones — that it is more ; 
compatible than its opposite measure, with the i 
genius of our Government — that it better consists [ 
with morals and religion, with the laws of nature ; 
and of general liberty, and with all that is sound, 
or just, or admissible in the composition and : 
structure of civil society. These, with their cor- 
relatives, make up the considerations — the justify- j 
ing and impelling considerations — upon which J 
this measure is to be driven on and driven through, i 
no matter what the sectional wounds it may deal, j 
or what the general convulsion to the States it i 
may endanger. 

For the purpose of securing to every portion of j 
the people a practical government, the best suited 
that could be to their protection and their interests, i 
our Republic, not consolidated into one, was kept i 
divided into separate and smaller Republics or j 
States, each one of which within its own particu- 
lar limits was assumed to be, and made to be the 
judge of whatever legislative act was most agree- 
able to itself, and best suited, in his opinion, to its ! 
affairs. 'Of the thirty States into which we are J 
now divided, fourteen have already come up here 
with their protestations and remonstrances against 
this measure of restriction; declaring it to be, in 
their judgment, not only wholly inadmissible to 
them, but so offensive and so subversive of their 
local rights, that some of them have averred, again 
and again, that rather than submit to it, " they 
would resist it at all hazards, and to the last ex- 
tremity." 

Here, then, under the regular action of our sys- 
tem, we have the opinions of those who are the 
recognised and absolute judges of their local inter- 
ests; and having these, can we doubt — nay, do 
we not know, that this measure, even before its 
passage, stands, and must continue to stand in un- 
compromising and dangerous hostility with the 
judgment and tranquillity of near one entire half of 
this Union ? 

Now, therefore, as the Government of that 
Union, bound by the strongest obligations of honor 
and of duty to execute its high trusts with refer- 
ence to the good of all, and not to the good alone 
of any particular parts, — bound so to execute these 
trusts as " to promote the common defence and 
the general welfare," and "to establish amongst 
the people and the States an intimate and perfect 
union with one another," — can we, looking on the 
one hand to the clear conditions upon which our 
trusts are to be performed, and on the other to the 
wide-spread and intense execration with which this 
proposed measure has been received, — can we say, 
deliberately, that it is an expedient one which ought 
to be passed, and shall be passed? Can we say, that 
it is expedient for the "general welfare," when half 
the country for which it is intended rises up in ad- 
vance of its adoption, to denounce it as insupporta- 
ble ? Can we say that it goes to promote a closerand 
kindlier union amongst the people and the States, 
and in that respect to fulfill a declared purpose of 
the Constitution, when we all see and know that 
the whole power of its action is to embitter them 
with, and perad venture to sever them from one 



another? Can we say that any measure is expe- 
dient which admits, by possibility even, the sup- 
position that its want of acceptability may be such 
as to compel the executive in the end to enforce it 
by the sword ? Gentlemen cannot surely forget, 
that whilst nep.rly all other governments are but 
modifications of the principle of force, and very 
naturally, therefore, depend upon it for support; 
ours, on the contrary, in all its parts, is a govern- 
ment of consent, depending not upon the power of 
arms, but upon that of general approbation to 
maintain it. Whenever, then, in any given case, the 
measures of this Governmental so opposed to pub- 
lic approbation as to require a resort to arms to en- 
force them, that resort, if undertaken, is in its whole 
nature monstrous, revolutionary, and incapable of 
resulting in anything else but evil and disaster to 
the country. Why, then, insist upon any one 
which portends such a course and such results? 
Why, especially, should the North push this meas- 
ure of the proviso to extremity upon the South, 
and so push it in the very wantonness of its nu- 
merical strength in this body, as if it was resolved, 
vindictively and at all hazards, to force her into an 
ignominious retreat from her declarations about it 
or into open and ruinous conflicts with the Gov- 
ernment ? And whether it be the one or the other, 
it is a purpose only for passion, and not for reason, 
patriotism, or statesmanship, to pursue or desire. 
The high functions which it is ours to execute are 
for the prosperity, the defence, the satisfaction, and 
the happiness of every part of the Republic, and 
not for any particular part of it. They are na- 
tional means for national ends;, they make up the 
power of all for the good of all, and that power 
could not be perverted from its proper purposes 
more inexcusably or more grossly than when ex- 
erted to foster into maturity a state of public affairs 
or public feeling prejudicial to the Union, which it 
was solely given to establish and to maintain. 
Looking at the unsatisfiable importunity with 
which the proviso has been urged upon Congress, 
in perfect defiance of its hostile, if not fatal effect 
upon the Union, a southern man cannot but ask in 
amazement, Why is this? Is it done to try the 
strength of our political system, and to see from 
actual proof what the agencies are that can trar it 
apart ? Nothing so irrational can be charged. Does 
the North suspect the loyalty of the South ? and is 
not this measure a reckless experiment upon it? 
Is it not meant as the experimentum cruets of our 
southern attachment to the Union? And are not 
the fine and subtle, but strong chords of that at- 
tachment to be operated upon like so many coarse 
strands of water-rotted Kentucky or Illinois hemp, 
subjected to extremity of trial for some object of 
naval equipment, and therefore to be strained and 
stretched by weight after weight until its utmost 
power of tension shall be discovered ? To us it 
seems as if this was the very spirit and purpose 
with which this hated proviso is so insatiably and 
so cruelly pressed upon us. If its injustice is less 
obvious to the North than it is to us, its hostility 
to the continued and prosperous union of them 
is, at this day, too palpable to all sections and to 
all eyes, to be overlooked or denied. Define it as 
you please, it is really and substantially, in its op- 
erations and effects, a first measure for the disso- 
lution of the Union. So I regard it, and hence, to 
a great degree, the unrelaxing opposition with 
which I consider it my duty, and the duty of every 



12 



member h«-re, representatively and individually, to |j 
expose and to resist it. J 

Suppose the southern attachment to the Union, 
which you gentlemen of tlie northern Stales think 
proper to distrust, shou'd sink overpowered under 
the cruel and ceaseless tests which you are prepar- 
ing f<>i it in your "promio," what public pood will 
you have accomplished a%the price of its sacrifice? 
What greater or better addition will you have " 
made to yourselves, to your country, or to man- 
kind, in the measure you will have carried, than 
you had in the attachment, support, and national 
peace you will have lost? You will, indeed, have 
gotten your proviso— thai will be safe; but the moral 
and social, if not the political unity of your coun- 
try will be broken up and destroyed. You will 
have thus gotten comparatively about as much as ' 
Adam and Eve did after their obedience had been 
abandoned. They got the beguiling serpent and the ' 
forbidden fruit as the reward of thetr experiment, ' 
but their peace with Heaven and their paradise on 
earth were swept away. 

Without looking, however, to that extreme and 
incomprehensible aggregate of national and indi- 
vidualevil — the breaking up of our Federal Union— 
than are other associated evils which are only 
short of this one, and only less to be dreaded and 
avoided because they contain the causes and ele- 
ments that involve it. 

Inallofourreflectionsupon thisUnion, and upon H 
the innumerable influences that go to affect it, we 
are never to forget that the highest of its high pow- '' 
ers — that only one which renders it supreme, and 
which truly entitles it to the epithet of " glorious," 
with which it is our pleasure and our habit to 
speak of it— that only " higher power" is a moral 
one. It is not to be found in your table of statis- 
tics. It does not exist in the number nor in the 
muscle of your sons — in your armies nor your na- 
vies—in your iron nor gold — your weapons of war 
nor your hoards of wealth— in your continents of 
land nor of sea — but in the boundless confidence, in- 
terest, attachment, love, and hope of your people; 
in the mys'eriousand exultant feeling which warms 
the heart of every American from the hour of his 
birth, and goes with him from his cradle to his 
grave as the invisible, but the cherished and cheer- 
ing companion of his life, that God, in his mercy, 
never gave such a Government or such a country 
toman before, and never will give such another 
again. 

Let us beware, then, how this feeling is dis- 
turbed. If kept unimpaired as the inspiring and 
the common one of our whole people, our Union 
can never be anything else than "glorious," and 
must even become progressively more and more 
so every day. But, strong as this feeling is, it 

must be fostered to be preserved; it is not too 

strong, though it is infinitely too precious and too 

l or destroyed. As long as 

the Constitution, which is the written and cove- 

l of the (Tnion, shall be carried out with 

perfect fidelity in all its purposes and provisions; 

aaloi hall have but one object, one II 

■, one law ol universal equity and kindness to 

i of the country in the i cerci i of its ' 

law--: . Q | Qg we m „ v |, e mi,-,, ^al 

nion will continue to be, what ii oughl to bi , 

and what it has been, the one supreme objeel of 

tru t, nod love, ami hope to every emy/m Within I 
it— the humc of his loyalty ar.d the habitation ol 



his peace. But if the contrary course of action be 
pursued — the Constitution fulfilled in part and de- 
nied in part, and the Government willfully and 
willingly perverted to objects of sectional legisla- 
tion, and portions of the country outraged by acts 
of injury and wrong — if this be so, we all feel and 
know that the great power spoken of, the moral 
power of this Union, will be gone, and that the 
Union itself, when it ceases to be the .source of 
common blessings, will rapidly degenerate into 
nothing better than an unnatural bond of mutual 
discord, contest, and hatred to all of its parties. 

Why, then, insist upon a measure (your " pro- 
viso") whose entire tendency is to this very re- 
sult? Is any one of you ready to say, whatever 
be the consequences to this Union from the pas- 
sage of that measure, whether they be those of 
instant conflict, or of corroding, undermining, de- 
stroying discontent, whatever tho form of the 
consequences — whatever the fate they may in- 
volve, come what may of it, give me — give me the 
"proviso." Are any of you ready to say this, 
and to say it in this spirit of reckless and utter 
daring? If so, all history, perhaps, can furnish 
but a single case of analogy for a more infatuated 
or more undoing desperation. When the hardened 
inhabitants of Jerusalem gathered around the cross 
and resolved to take upon themselves the blood of 
the crucifixion, they cried out with one, voice, 
" Loose unto us Barrabas"*-=give us the rioter 
and the murderer, but let the Lord of life, the 
Saviour of us all, let him hang upon the tree. 

Infatuated and irrational under any state of na- 
tional circumstances as it would be to risk the 
stability or the peace of our Union upon the pas- 
sage of any measure of untried and conjectured 
advantage, how much more so would it be for 
you, who advocate the proviso, to insist upon its 
adoption by Congress at all hazards, in the very 
face of the California example ? There it has been 
quietly and willingly adopted by a community 
composed, in part, of a slaveholding people, and 
so adopted, without any enactment, intervention, 
or influence of Congress. Why, then, not leave 
this whole matter of the proviso to be disposed of 
in like manner by the remaining communities 
whom it may concern, according to their own will, 
and without any intervention, or influence of any 
kind, first or last, from this body ; 

We of the South, for the most part, are content 
with this; and why not you also, who have already 
profited by it in so marked a case? We are con- 
tent with this plan of non-intervention, because in 
our judgment it has principle, expediency, and jus- 
tice to support it, and because, too, it furnishes 
not a temporary rule only, but a sound and a per- 
manent one, through all time, for the sa'isfactotw 
settlement of this agitating and |] ject. 

The Territories are so many emlu yo States, which 
i' would best consist, both with our national peace 
and with the general spirit of our federative sys- 
tem, to withdraw as early and as much 98 pos- 
sible from the shaping and fashioning hands of 
Congress, and admit as early and as tolly to the 
functions of States bi their circumstances will, in 

anywise, allow. Happily lot them, their ulti- 
mate association with our family of States is 
i upon a ruh which it is easy, in North 
America at least, to comply with. That rule, tho 
fundamental one, with all the States, is, that the 
Constitution of each shall be republican. That 



13 



it shall be so, is the only condition which our Con- 
stitution puts upon the otherwise perfect liberty of 
the Territories, when organizing themselves for 
States, to adopt any kind of government they 
please, or which it puts upon their after admission 
into the Union; and hence the only authority which 
the Constitution gives to Congress to look into the 
government of the States, is the mere authority to 
see that this condition is complied with, and that 
the republican form of government required has 
been actually and fully secured. We — all of us — 
hold it to have been right, and wise, and proper, 
on the part of our original States, and well worthy 
of everything it cost them, to have formed their 
own constitutions and systems of government 
according to their own will and pleasure; and, in 
what can it be considered less wise, or just, or 
proper, that our Territories should exercise the 
very same right of self-government when they are 
in a situation to do it? 

Instead of Congress, then, undertaking to pro- 
vide complete systems of government for the Ter- 
ritories, and thus, really , to act in suspension of one 
of the most precious and vital of all the rights 
which a community can enjoy — the right of gov- 
erning itself, — instead of this, how much more just 
and wise would it be for that body to restrict its 
authority over the Territories to the exercise of 
only so much as their protection may demand, and 
leave all else — the whole problem of their muni- 
cipal rights and institutions, to be regulated and 
determined by themselves, whenever their wishes 
or condition may require it? 

The Congress of 1787, instead of acting thus, 
and leaving the Territories of that day to provide 
for their own government, as each one of the States 
had just done for itself, even at the extreme ex- 
pense of war and revolution, was the first to set the 
example — the unwise and misleading example — of 
subjecting them to the supreme supervision and 
control of Congress. Although peculiar necessities 
for this act were believed, at that time, to exist, 
and were urged in justification of it, yet the act 
itself, and the celebrated ordinance which forms a 
part of it, have never ceased to be plead from that 
day to this as constituting a sort of common and 
consecrate law, by which all of our Territories, 
no matter how circumstanced, ought to be gov- 
erned. So true is this, in relation to the very 
Territories of which those that now engage our 
deliberations are a part, that the main feature of 
that ordinance was attempted to be ingrafted upon 
them, in both Houses of Congress, even before the 
acquisition of them had been fully completed ! 
The result of it all has been, to leave the Terri- 
tories without any regular territorial government 
at all — to distract our national councils with agita- 
tion, and to bring the different sections of our 
quiet Union into an inflamed and dangerous state 
of irritation and contest with each other. 

Such, in truth, is the condition of affairs which 
our wrangles on the subject of the Territories have 
brought about, that it is now evident to every one, 
that there can be no healthy administration of the 
Government, and no repose — perhaps even no se- 
curity to the country — until both of them, both 
Government and country are extricated, and effect- 
ually extricated from the harassments and dan- 
gers of that condition. Happily, it is yet possible 
for this to be done, and to be done, too, without 
diffiulty , if we have but the spirit and the virtue to 



practice a little forbearance of power, and to stand 
by the general principles of our system. Try the 
efficacy for this purpose, of simple non interven- 
tion. Keep the schemes and the theories — the 
plots, passions, and interests of ambitious politi- 
cians from all legislative connection with the Terri- 
tories; let there be no constitution-making by Congress 
for them, but let that be reserved as an essen- 
tial first right, to be exercised when need be, by 
themselves, — forbear the exercise of congressional 
power just to this extent, and if no gend should 
come of it, you will, at least, have the satisfaction 
of knowing that you were acting for good, and 
upon a reasonable plan of securing it. 

Whatever our course of action on this subject 
may be, or ought to be, it is certain that our pres- 
ent one must be changed. We have now been gov- 
ernment-making, and trying to government-m.ike 
for the Territories until, without effecting anything 
valuable for them, we are like to bring the utmost 
injury and ruin upon ourselves. Under such cir- 
cumstances to persist in the same course of self- 
sacrificing efforts, would be as wicked as it would 
be foolish, and is, in no sort, allowable in the exe- 
cution of a national trust. Admonished, then, of 
the evil ofinterferencein this matter, let Congress at 
once abandon it, and try the benefit of the contrary 
course. Nothing could be simpler than that con- 
trary course — nothing freer from every species of 
embarrassment — nothing in more perfect keeping 
with the principles and the structure of our sys- 
tem, general and local — and nothing more auspi- 
cious for the settlement of all questions concerning 
the institution of slavery in the Territories, and in 
the States growing out of them, without aggita- 
tion, offence, or complaint of any kind, or in any 
quarter whatsoever. We are invoked to the work 
of deliverance and security by every considera- 
tion which reason, justice, necessity, and love of 
country can supply. Let us venture upon it, then, 
in the manner suggested, in good faith, and in 
good earnest, and fear not to trust the issues of our 
action to time and Providence. 

Let us now, Mr. Speaker, (said Mr. McD.,) 
consider for a moment or two some of the grounds 
upon which the Texas boundary bill, with the ten 
millions of dollars therewith connected, ought or 
ought not to be supported. 

This bill comes to us with the approval of the 
Senate. Is it also entitled to ours ? 

A consideration standing in the foreground of 
all others in this case is, that if this, or some 
kindred act of legislation is not adopted by Con- 
gress, and adopted without delay, a conflict of 
arms between the United States Government and 
that of Texas, is apparently inevitable. The 
President has advised Congress, by message, of 
his determination to take and maintain for the 
United States, by the sword, if necessary, the act- 
ual possession of all the territory of New Mex- 
ico, which was relinquished to the UnilcrT States 
by the late treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. On the 
other hand, the GovemoTof Texas is preparing, 
under an act of the Legislature of Texas, to es- 
] tablish the jurisdiction "of that State over a con- 
] siderable portion of this very same territory. 
Each of these executive officers in this matter 
is acting under a sense of official obligation, from 
which Neither one of them, doubtless, considers 
himself as having the slightest liberty to depart; 
arid hence a collision, which may speedily draw 



14 



the whole Union into its vortex, is apparently in- > 
evitable, unless Congress, that has the necessary 
power in the matters of difference between them, 
shall s<» adjust them as to make collision impos- 
sible. Without going into any exposition of the 
constitutional doctrines of Executive power and 
duty which the President has laid down in his late 
message upon this subjpet, (and which it would 
require a good deal of time properly to do,) Mr. 
Mi D. can only say of them, in passing, thai his .' 
impressions are against them. 

Whatever else may be thought of the adjust- 
ment of those differences which is now o tiered 
in the boundary bill before us, it will hardly 
be denied that it is a well-timed and a reasona- | 
ble effort on the part of Congress to discharge 
its duties in the premises, and to protect the 
country from the causes and calamities of civil 
war. Should this bill have the effect of pre- 
venting any bloodshed between the Federal and 
the State authorities, and have no other, it 
would for that one alone be well worthy of the 
wisdom and patriotism of Congress to pass it, — 
for no one can disguise from himself the fact, that 
a blow struck, or a musket fired between the par- 
ties, in the present distempered condition of the 
public feeling, would, in all probability, convert 
the whole Union into a battle-field, and thus 
plunge it, and all in it, into a depth and duration of 
ruin and woe which the mind shudders even to 
think upon. 

That it would, and must, have this one good 
effect cannot be doubted. 'But this is not all. It 
commends itself to our sanction in other aspects 
also. Indeed, if it be taken as a whole, if the 
many delicate and disputed points which it em- 
braces and provides for be candidly considered, it 
will be found to contain, at least, the main ele- 
ments of a sound and equitable settlement of them 
all — a settlement which violates no right of Federal 
or of State Government, which wrongs no section, 
which cooperates with no partisan purposes, and 
which thus comes up to and satisfies the obliga- 
tions of national impartiality and national justice. 
80 far as the interests, the policy, or the duty of 
Texas are affected by this bill, they may be safely 
confided to thcguardianshipof Texasherself, with- 
out any enlightenment or discussion from us. 
She is the constitutional judge of all such matters, 
and is, no doubt, as competent in fact, as she is 
in law, to dispose of them justly and wisely. Her 
absolute and perfect right to decide upon them as 
she pleases, is a fundamental part of the bill, and 
herein the great principle of State sovereignty is 
kept intact and inviolate. 

Air. McD. has always been of the opinion that 
the claim of Texas to the whole of the country 
of the EUo Grande, from its mouth to the 
northern limit of the United States, was a sound 
one, and Ought to be allowed by Congress. But he 
is, at the-samc time, not insensible to the strength 
of the argument against that opinion, nor is he 
unaware of the profound conviction with which 
that contrary opinion to his own is relied upon 
By members of eminent ability in both Houses; 
and hence he cannot resist the conclusion, that 
the adjustment of that claim which is provided for 
in the bill, is, upon the whole, a just and proper 
one, and as near the exact right of the case as 
cith' r of the parties — the Government and people 
of U.t Union on one Bide, or the government and 



people of Texas on the other — could ever have any 
reason to expect. It ought, therefore, as he thinks, 
to be received, and carried through as satisfactory 
by both. According to a careful examination 
which was made into this subject by one of the 
officers of the Land Office at the request of Mr. 
M< !>•, it appears that the boundary line of the 
bill will give to Texas more, by some twenty odd 
thousand square miles, than that of the " omnibus 
compromise" would have done, but less by eighty- 
eight thousand square miles than her whole claim 
amounts to. In other words, the bill cuts off and 
leaves out of Texas eighty-eight thousand square 
miles of the Mexican country lying cast or the 
RioGrande. Of this eighty eight thousand square 
miles, about one half (|) lies north of 3G° 30' 
north latitude, (the Missouri line,) and the other 
half south of it. It seems, Mr. Speaker, that the 
ultimate situation of this excluded territory of 
eighty-eight thousand square miles — whether it 
shall be slaveholding or tree — has taken stronger 
hold of the anxieties of this House than any other 
po'rtion of the bill, or even the whole bill itself. 
On one side we are told that an unfounded and 
worthless claim of a slave State to a large amount 
of the national domain is notonly to be sanctioned, 
but to be paid for out of the public Treasury, with 
an immense sum of money, in order to enlarge 
the extent of the slaveholding empire. On the 
other hand, it is said that this claim is a perfectly 
sound claim, which no one would think of re- 
fusing to Texas, but that she is a slave State, 
and that the ten millions of dollars which it is 
proposed to give her for it is nothing but a de- 
vice to get her territory out of her hands, in order 
to convert it into free soil. Judging from these and 
like suggestions, which we hear on all sides around 
us, it would seem that our whole action here is a 
deceptive one, and that our real object in this 
boundary bill is so to shape it as to turn it into an 
act for the ultimate benefit of free soil or of sla- 
very. What may be the ultimate effect of it in 
either of these respects, it would notonly be ex- 
tremely difficult for any one to say, but almost idle 
for any one even to conjecture. One thing about 
it, however, seems to be pretty clear, and that is, 
that its instrumentality for these purposes is not 
likely to be much either way, and certainly not 
so much as to afford, other matters considered, 
any reasonable or sufficient ground for its rejec- 
tion. What that ultimate effect may be, m;:y, 
perhaps, be conjectured with some plausibility 
when Congress shall settle upon the territorial 
government of New Mexico — that community 
which is to receive, by this boundary bill if it 
passes, all the territory east of the Rio Grande 
which is refused to, or which is taken from off, the 
State of Texas. 

As thing3 now stand, all the country which this 
bill may take from Texas above 3G° 3U' it abso- 
lutely free soil by the terms of Annexation, so that 
things continuing as at present, the slavery and 
free-soil contest can relate only to the country 
I which was el limed by Texas but refused by this 
bill, below 30° 3U'. Irthat country were now made 
a component part of Texas, and put under her 
juri diction and laws, it is not to be doubted that 
I the chances of establishing slavery upon it when it 
1 shall hereafter be divided off from Texas, and be 
J formed into a State, or part of a Stale, by itself 
i are far greater lhan if the contrury course be 



15 



adopted, of now cutting it off altogether from the 
dominion of Texas and making it a permanent 
part of New Mexico. In this aspect of the case, 
then, free-soil would seem to triumph; and so it 
would, in fact, if there were no counter considera- 
tions bearing upon it. Recollect, then, that Texas 
is not the owner, but the claimant only of the 
country spoken of; and that her claim, which is one 
of perplexity and doubt, if tried before the Supreme 
Court of the United States, might, peradventure, 
be decided against her. But be that claim what it 
may, it is by this bill, made good for ten millions 
of dollars to her and to the maintenance and ex- 
tension of slavery within the vast boundaries pro- 
Eosed to be left to, and to be established for her — 
oundaries which include an area of 237,321 
square miles, four times the size of Virginia, and 
capable of being finally divided into four States be- 
sides herself, or into five in all, of more than 40,000 
oijuarc miles each. Weighing those offsetting; 
parts of the case with one another, and consider- 
ing more especially the peace-giving character of 
the bill, it is not easy to see why this harassing 
dispute about slave soil and free soil, as connected 
with this bill, should be continued any longer, or 
be permitted to prejudice and defeat its passage. 
Let us, at least, wash our hands of it for the 
present, as we may well be allowed to do, having 
had our share, and more than our share of it al- 
ready, and dismissing it from this Hall, let us, if 
possible, commit it to other tribunals and to other 
times. 

We are not to forget, Mr. Speaker, in the midst 
of our contestations with one another upon smaller 
matters of policy or of duty, that there is one 
great, solemn, and overawing duty belonging to 
this body, which comprehends all others, and by 
which the adjustment of all others must, more or 
less, be controlled — that, namely, of restoring 
peace to an agitated and contending country. 
Ours, in a peculiar and eminent degree, is the high 
duty of replacing and maintaining the Union in 
which that country, as a whole, consists, not upon 
the hesitating consent — not upon the broken con- 
fidence — not upon the discontented but quelled 
spirit, and not upon the surrendered safety of any 
of its parts, but upon the honorable conciliation, 
the responding faith, and the cordial agreement of 
them all. In the approbation and consent of the 
people and of the States, we have the foundation 
of the Union; and in that Union — in the concentra- 
tion and the hostility of power it involves — we 
have at one and the same time, both the strength 
and the weakness of our system. It is the vital 
point, therefore, which every effort of wisdom and 
patriotism should be habitually put forth to defend. 
If we are to judge either from the general princi- 
ciples of national intercourse and action, or from 
the ordinary, well-understood, and unchangeable 
passions of the human heart, no event in the prog- 
ress of public things is more probable, or more 
certain even, than this, that whenever our Federal 
Union is dissolved, whether violently or by con- 
sent, and its several States are rearranged into 
new confederacies, or remain independent and 
alone, their present peaceful, prosperous, and 
happy relations with one another will be gradually, 
if not instantly, changed into relations of jealousy, 
enmity, altercation, and war. Look at their im- 
mense inequalities of geographical advantage and 
physical power — at the dangerous and tempting vi- 



cinity of the weak to the strong — at their long lines of 
border-connection and the perpetuul provocations 
and facilities which those will afford to every spe- 
cies of jurisdictional trespass and border feud. 
Look at the lakes, bays, and rivers intervening 
among the States, the noble bonds at present of 
mutual peace because of mutual prosperity and 
interest, but if separated, the never-failing sources 
of quarrel, because of contested rights, privileges, 
and purposes of navigation. Besides these there 
are the radical and disaffecting differences which 
attach to their different texture and habits of so- 
ciety, — and then also the vindictive and revengeful 
passions which all ruptured intimacies, national or 
personal, are sure to excite; take all together, and 
we have in them a mass of materials, which, 
however'providentially harmonized under our Fed- 
eral head, could lead so certainly to nothing else 
amongst separated States as to jealousies, di fty, ; 
aggressions, and bloodshed. When aggrest 
any other of the thousand cause! of war, w.. .i* 
national folly and national wrong are always at 
hand to supply — when this or any cause shall 
bring two or more of these separate States 
into actual conflict with one another, then the evil 
hour of them all will have come, and their after 
fortunes will be no better than mere spasmodic 
struggles to keep alive. But if war comes, or is 
threatened, or is expected, then all the muniments 
and resources of war must be had; levies of men and 
levies of money must be made; garrisons and 
armies, and navies provided, and that, too, themore 
lavishly because of the proximity of the parties 
and their innumerable accessibilities to mutual and 
vital attack. And all these again will be followed 
here, as they have been in like cases everywhere, 
also by standing armies, and by a new and more 
powerful organization of executive authority to 
raise and command them. But with standing ar- 
mies and suprerr e executives, nothing of our birlh- 
rights'will be left to contend for. Cast off, then, 
your national bond, rearrange the separated 
States into any new combinations that you please, 
violently or peaceably, and your vast strength of 
influence and of power, foreign and domestic, is 
gone; your lofty mission of deliverance and of 
liberty to the na.ions is gone; the example, which 
fell, like the shadow of Saint Peter, with healing and 
hope upon the despairing and the diseased , is gone; 
that master spirit which was bringing the whole 
world into communion with itself, rousing and re- 
generating its millions, and bearing all things on- 
ward for good by the resistless energy and might 
of its own beneficent and profound progression — 
that spirit, too, will be gone. State after State will 
sink under conflicts with each other, and all will 
be swayed by the law of the sword, until some 
American Maximin, or American Alexander, con- 
queringTall, shall again consolidate all, and stamp 
his fooT upon the bold and the free heart, which 
throbs at this hour with so strong a sense of hu- 
man liberty and so rich a hope of renovating the 
o-overnments and people of the world. 
° But the range and the horrors of such a catas- 
trophe do not terminate with ourselves. They ex- 
tend also to other lands than 0ur own, whose 
hopes, interests and freedom are deeply compli- 
cated with ours. Indeed, our whole position as a 
people, the unparalleled physical and moral capa- 
bilities into which we have been wrought up for 
our own welfare and for auspicious action upon the 



16 



welfare of others, is, itself, hardly less than a mir- 
acle in human story; and in the whole course of 
that story litis never, in any other case, been real- 
ized so providentially or bo responsibly before. 
From the empire of Nebuchadnezzar to that of Na- 
poleon, how immense the distance, how stupend- 
ous the revolutions that have intervened, how in- 
tense the fiery contests which have burned over 
continents and age--, changing their theatre and their 
instruments, and leaving upon the whole surface 
of the globe scarce a spot unstained by their deso- 
lating and bloody track; and yet no national off* 
spring lias sprung from them all so fitted as our 
own united America, to redeem for the world the 
agonie.s they have cost it. Whatever, in that long 
period, other nations may have risen up to be, and 
however truly and illustriously a few of them may 
ha-; prolonged (heir day and advanced the civili- 
ze ' \ ami the wisdom of themselves and the world, 

venti ., lias ever embodied such an ug- . 

g'.b§ate of national happiness or political truth as 
our°own Republic, and none like it has ever ful- 
filled the ultimate problem of all government, that, 
namely, of making the utmosufreedom of the citi- j 
zen and the utmost power of the State the coexist- 
ing and the upholding conditions of one another. 

With a freedom only inferior to that of Rome in 
the worst qualities of hers, those of aggression and 
conquest; and superior to that of Greece in its 
best, these of civilization and defence; with noth- 
ing but this freedom, its story and its triumphs, 
our Republic has become confederate alike with 
the liberty sentiment of the world; and with the 
majestic power of human sympathy to propa- 
gate itself, and hence its flag is destined to wave 
not onlv over an empire of illimitable means, but 
over the illimitable empires of reborn and self- 
governing man. 

And now that this Republic of freedom, happi- 
ness, and power, is a heritage of ours, who that has 
shared as we have done in the countless blessings 
that belong to it — who that knows it, as we do, to be 
the heritage of every good which human nature 
can enj iy, or human government secure — who, so 
situated, could make it or could see it the sport 
of violent, selfish or parricidal passions ? Who of 
us, without putting forth every faculty of soul and 
body to prevent it, could see it go down — down 
under some monstrous struggle of brother with 
brother, an eternal crush upon > Ives, an eter- 
nal example for the shuddering, the admonition, 
the horror and the curse of universal man ? 

There have been those who, impelled only by 
their own noble and generous nature, have rushed 
forward on the field of battle, and given their own 
bosom 10 the blow of death, that, thereby, some 
loved comrade or commander might be spared, or 
some patriotic purpose vindicated and secured. 
There have been those who have, gone into the 
dungeons of misfortune and of guilt, and worn out 
the days and years of their own lives that they 
mi"ht alleviate the disease or the despair of their 
wr etrhed . -""I. "< least, kindle ud for 

oroth'-r world the aspirations and hopes which 
wrr , it this. And there have been 

0( |, , , have companioned with the pes 

tilencc, and have walked, day by day, in its. silent 
and horrid footsteps, that they might learn in 
what way to encounter its power, and bo be en- 



abled, reverently, to lift up from crushed and an- 
guished communities the too-heavy pressing of 
the hand of the Almighty. And are we, who hold 
the sublimest political trust ever committed to the 
hands of any other people — are we alone to be in- 
capable of any and every dedication of ourselves 
which that trust requires? Can we stand calmly, 
helplessly, and faithlessly by, and allow it to be 
wrecked and lost? 

In this hour of danger, this eventful hour of the 
age — this hour, which is all in all to us and to mil- 
lions besides, those oppressed millions of other 
lands who are ruled by irresponsible power, and 
who, as they lie upon the earth, overwhelmed 
and crushed by the weight of altars or of thrones, 
stfll look to us for hope, and pour out their hearts 
in sobbings and in prayer to Heaven that ours may 
be the radiant and the steady light which shall 
never bewilder or betray — in this hour, so full. of 
interest, our mo.her country comes into our very 
midst, and, taking each by the hand, says to each, 
" Son, give me, give me thy heart." And will we 
not, can we not do it ? Can we not give it — freely, 
proudly give it all .'—keeping no part of it back for 
any end or any passion of our own, though dear, it 
may be, as a right eyeor a right arm ? If any of U3 
cannot— if there is any lingering, denying, clinging 
feeling which the heart will not, or cannot deliver 
over at such a moment, let us tear that heart from 
our bosom if we can, and lift up our supplications 
to the Father above that He would send us another 
in its place, better fitted for the sight of Heaven, 
and for the service and fellowship of man. 

Gjve us in our duties here but something of the 
spirit of the Roman father who delivered up his 
son to the axe of justice, because he loved his 
country better than his blood; or that of the gal- 
lant young officer of the Revolution who was de- 
tected and executed, whilst performing, under the 
orders of his immortal chief, the service of a spy, 
[Lieutenant Hale.] When led to the spot of exe- 
cution, as he stood upon it, and looked forth, for 
the last time, upon the smile of day, and upon the 
bright and benignant sun of heaven as it beamed 
upon him, and felt the agony that all— all was 
gone, his young and hopeful and joyous nature 
involuntarily shrank, and he is said to have cried 
out, with impassioned exclamation, "Oh, it is a 
bitter, bitter thing to die, and how bitter, too, to 
know that 1 have but one life wbich I can give to 

! my country!" Give us only this spirit for our 
work here, doubt not but that it will be approved 
of by our land, and be crowned with a long fu- 
turity of thankfulness and rejoicing. 

[Mr. McDowell considers it his duty to say 
that this speech, from page 10, second column be- 
ginning with the words " Do this," to the end, was 
nol actually delivered by him in the House of Repre- 

| sentatives, but was prepared to be delivered in the 
same manner as the part of it which was spoken, 

1 and would have been but for the want of time. 
Hi regards it as a necessary part, and therefore 

I takes the liberty of adding it. This he feels him- 

' self the freer to do, as the House was almost 
unanimous (one or two only dissenting) in its call 
upon him to "go on " when his noiirhad expired.] 



H 286 79 



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